Latest posts
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The Great Victory Parade: When History Becomes State-Sponsored Fanfiction

There are two things authoritarian governments love more than power: parades and revisionist history. So it was no surprise that on September 1–3, 2025, Beijing gave us both in one dazzling, over-produced spectacle—an 80th-anniversary Victory Day parade so self-congratulatory it made the Oscars look humble. Xi Jinping, standing tall on his reviewing platform, hosted none
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iPhone 17: The Awe-Dropping Slab We’ll All Pretend Not to Need, Then Buy Anyway

On September 9, 2025 at 10 a.m. PT, Apple will once again transform its glass spaceship into a megachurch of consumer longing, inviting the faithful to witness what it calls the “Awe-dropping” keynote. The name alone is a corporate sleight of hand: awe as in wonder, drop as in your rent money, and keynote as
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ICE Storm: Trump, Kristi Noem, and the Great Chicago Occupation

The Trump administration has a way of treating cities like wayward children—Chicago most of all. For decades, conservative politicians have invoked it as shorthand for chaos, crime, and everything wrong with “blue America.” To them, Chicago is less a place where millions of people live, work, and build lives, and more a stage for proving
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Prestige TV, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Firehose

By 2025, prestige television no longer means anything. It’s like calling water wet, or calling Marvel “cinema” just to rile up Scorsese. Prestige used to be rarefied air—The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men. Now it’s practically background radiation, humming behind every streaming app. Prestige has metastasized. Every show arrives pre-packaged as “prestige,” the way cereal
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Meghan Trainor vs. the Judgmental Treadmill

There are few things more American than policing a woman’s body. Apple pie, baseball, and the relentless demand that every female celebrity perform an impossible balancing act for a crowd of spectators who will boo no matter where she lands. In 2025, Meghan Trainor has become the latest sacrificial lamb to the treadmill that isn’t




